The thrilling extended matchup where the Dodgers overcome the Toronto Blue Jays by one run attracted a combined 51 million viewers in the United States, Canada, and Japanese markets. Major League Baseball announced this marks the most-watched Fall Classic Game 7 since the 1991 edition contest between the Minnesota Twins and Atlanta Braves.
Television Viewership Breakdown
The Saturday epic contest drew over 27 million audience members on Fox Sports channels, Fox Deportes and their streaming platforms. Per Nielsen, it was the second most-watched program of the previous week.
It additionally is the most-watched World Series game after the 2017 Game 7 involving the Dodgers and Houston Astros, which drew 29.07 million. This represents a sixteen percent improvement compared to the last finale featuring the Nationals and Houston Astros, which drew 23.19M.
In the Nielsen ratings, the sixth game ranked fourth, Game 4 was seventh, Game 5 came in 8th, and Game 3 finished in 13th place.
International Viewership Numbers
In Canada, the climactic game recorded 11.6M viewers on Sportsnet and the French TVA Sports channel. This was the highest-rated English-language broadcast in the country since the 2010 edition Vancouver Winter Olympics.
In the Japanese market, where the deciding contest began at 9 PM in the local time zone, it attracted 12M. This followed last Friday’s sixth game – in which Fall Classic Most Valuable Player Yoshinobu Yamamoto allowed a single run in six innings – drew 13.1 million spectators, making it the highest-rated Fall Classic game on a single network in the country.
Overall Totals and Trends
The full seven-match World Series drew 15.71M audience members on the Fox network, a 2% increase from the previous year’s Dodgers-Yankees series. This represents the initial instance after 2015 and ‘16 that the World Series has seen viewership increases for two consecutive years.
Including the opening game telecast on the Univision network, the complete American average was 16.1 million. The total Fall Classic viewership in the Japanese market was 9.7M and 8.1 million in Canada.
The full MLB Postseason on Fox and its sister channels drew over 8 million viewers, an 8% rise over the previous year and the network’s best playoff performance since the 2017 season.
MLB announced that the Fall Classic was broadcast in over 200 nations and regions by forty-four broadcasting partners in sixteen different languages.
